Business

Business / Writing — 1 Comment
29
May 10

Text Playlist

Inspired by Frank Chimero and Liz Danzico, I’ve decided to share my own text playlist. These are a collection of articles I make time to read every month to inspire me and to make me think. These articles keep me on the right track as I inevitably get thrown off course.

They’re separated into three categories: business, life, and how I work.

Business

Why I gave away my company to charity

Two friends were at a party held at the mansion of a billionaire. One said, “Wow! Look at this place! This guy has everything!” The other said, “Yes, but I have something he’ll never have: enough.”

I always make sure to read this article first because it helps me think about having enough. Right now, I constantly imagine how my life could be better. I could have a nicer car or a bigger laptop screen or a family of my own. Through storytelling, Derek reminds me that there is more to life than things and wanting more. I’m always wanting more, but I will someday be completely happy with everything I have.

Profitable and proud: Campaign Monitor

While the financial success has been great, there are other aspects of the business that I would consider more of a success personally. I genuinely still love what I do. I work with interesting, funny people. My wife and I are expecting our first child soon and I can work the hours I want. For me these things are much better indicators of a successful business than anything on a spreadsheet.

I do what I do to make money. That’s how I gauge my success, but that isn’t my end goal. The end goal is my happiness and money is just one thing that contributes to that. You couldn’t beg me to take a $250,000 a year job if I wasn’t going to love what I was doing. Too many people chase a paycheck and realize too late that there is more to life than that piece of paper you get every two weeks. Dave from Campaign Monitor helps me understand that money isn’t the only thing that will determine how successful I am.

Life

Making the Clackity Noise

Tell me something that happened. Use the names of people you’d forgotten about, and say what you’d thought would happen but didn’t. Write down what part of the song was playing when you slammed the door only to realize you had to go back inside for your car keys. Can you remember when you were still little enough to hide under the kitchen sink where it smelled like ammonia and Comet and old sponges? What was the color of the clunky old car your Dad would let you help steer. What brand did he smoke?

Merlin never ceases to inspire me as a writer. If I’m down to earth, he’s slightly below that. The best writing I seem to do is when I sit down at the computer and type. I write about whatever I’m thinking at the moment. Most of it is crap, but the good parts always float to the top.

That’s how I won a $1,500 scholarship for school. I had to write a two-page essay about what we wanted to do in life. So I just sat outside one day with my laptop and started typing. I typed for 20 minutes, proofread it for another 10 and handed it in. My professor who picked the winners said it was some of the best writing he’s ever seen. That’s the last time I make an outline for a 5-paragraph essay like they beat into my head in high school. From now on, I’ll just tell a story.

I need to make that clackity noise more often.

Life is Beautiful

This tune we’re too busy to hear will not be played again. Never forget to be thankful for your life.

It’s something we hear thousands of times, but it’s something that too many people forget in the daily hustle. They get distracted by what direction their career is headed instead of enjoying the simple, meaningful things like family and friendship.

I’m guilty of this as well. I convince myself that I’ll only be this busy until I save up more money and then I can carry on. It’s only temporary, right? I’m still wrestling with the line between work and life. Work is winning right now, but I’m determined not to let that rule my short time doing the “proton dance.”

How I work

Playing is Serious

Fooling around is serious stuff, whether it’s for the sake of our work or for the sake of our sanity. Don’t get me wrong: design can be serious stuff, and every professional has the right to take their craft seriously. But, somewhere in the myriad of analysis and tight deadlines, we’ve revoked our permission to play around with ideas and experiment.

And that’s unfortunate. Everyone needs a sandbox, somewhere they can try out new ideas without any consequences. I haven’t discovered how I play best and maybe that’s not what playing is about. Maybe I shouldn’t be trying to optimize my play-to-work ratio. Maybe play can be more productive and improve my real work in the long run.

Better

The things that are meant to make you feel more connected today often turn out to be insubstantial time sinks – empty, programmatic encouragements to groom and refine your personality while sitting alone at a screen.

Funny how all this social media makes me more anti-social. I’d rather Facebook message someone I haven’t talked to in a while than give them a call or meet them for coffee. I talk to people on Twitter who I’ve never met in person and sometimes I enjoy that more than talking to a friend I haven’t seen in a while. Maybe I need to go on a digital diet.

Hey speedy, slow yourself down

I needed to set a new pace. I need to balance the quality with the quantity. I need to say NO to projects, time lines and budgets. I need to pay attention to the details and prevent stupid mistakes.

I’m going through the same thing Kyle went through. I’m concentrating on being efficient and productive, but I give very little thought to actually making something I’m proud of. I haven’t updated my portfolio in a while for a reason.

I have recently been sacrificing quality under the pressure of deadlines and project budgets.

But my current project is going to be my best yet. How am I going to make it the best? Magic probably. Or I’ll take my time to go over every little design element and HTML tag to make it the best that it can be. I know I can do better.

10 Ideas in January

Be picky in work relationships. Realize that agreeing to unfair circumstances not only hurts you, but your peers as well, because it pushes what is acceptable behavior in the wrong direction.

I need to learn how to say no. I rarely turn down a project because I always think it’s going to be my last offer. I’m stuffing my stomach with every last bit of work in case there’s nothing else left to eat.

At least that’s what I tell myself. Really my project opportunities have never been better, and with my constant hunger for learning, they’re only going to keep getting better. I’m beginning to get used to that feeling.

De-optimizing

What if my bookmarks were hard to get to? What if I stripped all the links out of the article I’m reading? What if I had to solve an algebra problem before jumping into Google Reader? Would I go? What if every time I turned on my TV, it told me that the average American spends 2 months watching television per year? Would I watch?

What if I could only check Twitter once a week? What if I couldn’t eat dessert before eating all my vegetables? What if I didn’t have internet for a day? Smells like freedom to me and I’d like to give that a shot.


Stay up to date with my text playlist with the RSS feed. I’d love to see your text playlist.

Business — 1 Comment
26
Mar 10

The Value of Failure

In REWORK, the authors Jason and David talk about how learning from failure in business is overrated. They cite a New York Times article about how venture-backed companies led by a winning entrepreneur are more likely to succeed.

Already-successful entrepreneurs were far more likely to succeed again: their success rate for later venture-backed companies was 34 percent. But entrepreneurs whose companies had been liquidated or gone bankrupt had almost the same follow-on success rate as the first-timers: 23 percent.

Failing can teach you an important lesson when you’re running a business, but success is a better teacher (and not to mention more fun). Failing teaches you only what not to do, what to avoid. If you study your successes and come across the same situation, you’ll know exactly what to do.

“Fail early and fail often” is a phrase I often hear repeated and one I’ve come to dislike. Failing causes pain and the human condition is to avoid pain in the future. When you burn your hand, you learn not to touch the hot fire. You don’t start out building the fire by saying “okay, I’m going to touch the hot fire so I learn what not to do in the future.” You do your best to avoid the fire altogether.

Failing is different than making mistakes. No business journey will be mistake-free. You learn from your mistakes and constantly readjust. I don’t consider those little errors failures.

When I run a business, I keep my eye on the prize (profitability). If I worried about the odds against me or every possible reason I could fail, I’d never get anything done.

Business — 3 Comments
3
Feb 10

Creating Jobs

The Economist is a magazine that goes into great depth about government and economic issues. I was surprised to see Steve Jobs on the cover, rather than Obama, considering both of their recent public presentations.

It got me thinking:

Who has done more to create jobs and improve the economy? Barack Obama or Steve Jobs.

Barack Obama has an $800,000,000,000 stimulus package to hire workers. This creates “work” but it doesn’t create “jobs.” As soon as that money disappears, so do the jobs. Should the government really be worrying about creating jobs, or should they be governing in such a way that they allow entrepreneurs to do the creating?

Steve Jobs has iTunes, Mac computers, the iPhone and the new iPad on his resumé. These products create jobs for the sellers and distributors of these electronics. As a byproduct, they’ve also created an ecosystem of job opportunities behind it. How many people have created their own jobs making iPhone apps? How many independent musicians make a comfortable living selling their songs on iTunes? How many designers are more creative and effective because of what is possible with web apps for the iPhone and iPad?

It’s not the government’s duty to “create” jobs. The taxpaying masses shouldn’t be the ones paying the bill for these few government workers. The government should get its hands out of the pie and let innovators like Steve Jobs do the job creating by making kick ass products that people actually want to buy. The government does a good job of providing a common defense and law enforcement, but it’s horribly inefficient at creating jobs.

Business — 6 Comments
20
Jan 10

Web Apps I Use Daily

In response to @drawar, I thought I’d share a bit about how I work. I plan on being more open in the future, but this is all you get for now.

These are the web apps I use on a daily basis to manage my web design projects and further my design knowledge.

Instapaper

Instapaper is listed first because I do a lot of reading, and much of it isn’t from books. Keeping up to date with web standards requires almost constant reading and Instapaper makes that much easier to manage. Whenever I visit an article I want to read, I click the “Read later” bookmarklet and it goes to my Instapaper account. I’ll read the articles from there in bursts every couple days. Recently, I’ve been reading the articles (and saving notes on them) on my Kindle and Marco’s new Kindle formatting is a life saver. If I had to choose one web app to take with me to a deserted island, it would be Instapaper.

Gmail

I’ve actually gone so far as to completely replace my desktop application with Gmail. When I used Mail, I found myself checking my email too often. Moving to a web app has helped this because typing in “gmail.com” in a new browser tab is enough of a barrier to stop me from checking it obsessively. Three years I’ve been using Gmail and I’ve never once had an “emergency email” (despite the numerous emails with that in the subject). It took that simple step to make me realize that.

Notable

Notable is an app for getting feedback from my clients on designs I do. Instead of using email to try to describe what needs changed, the client can make corrections and leave feedback right on the design. To see it in action, check out ZURB’s CNN redesign.

FreshBooks

FreshBooks handles all my billing and invoicing. I don’t particularly enjoy that part of my business and FreshBooks makes it super easy to put out of my mind. It does its job well and doesn’t take up too much of my brain’s CPU power. Also FreshBooks has the best customer service I’ve ever seen. They gave their blog readers a chance to get a copy of Entrepreneur magazine when they were the cover story. Inside was a Post It note as a thank you handwritten by the CEO of the company. That simple gesture still amazes me to this day.

Those are the four I use every single day. Notoriously absent from this list is Basecamp because I’ve never had a need for it before, despite following what 37signals does for the past five years. Recently, I’ve been using it for bigger projects with more group work. I expect to start using it on personal and client projects soon.

Business — No Comments
24
Oct 09

Why Angels Should Charge Startups To Pitch Their Ideas

Jason Calacanis revealed a “scam” in the startup investment market: some angel investors are charging would-be entrepreneurs to pitch them. How dare they? He disagrees with this practice, but I tend to think what those angels are doing is a good idea.

Why Angels Should Charge Potential Entrepreneurs

  1. Eliminates spam. Not typical email spam, but it is a way to separate out the great ideas from the startups that are using the shotgun approach. If an entrepreneur isn’t willing to fork over $10K to pitch their revolutionary business idea, I would start to doubt how truly revolutionary their idea is.
  2. Allows angels to concentrate on the really great ideas. With all the noise deterred by the entrance fee, the entrepreneurs that are left are going to be the cream of the crop. If an angel firm used to see 100 pitches a month, but now they see 20 and still invest in the same number of startups, wouldn’t that be a good thing?
  3. Idiots get shut down immediately. “Entrepreneurs” who are out to make a quick buck while putting someone else’s money wouldn’t even consider paying to pitch. This represents a small number of startups. The one’s with great ideas are going to succeed regardless of whether they pay to pitch or not, but the idiots are going to have a harder time if their money is on the line.

Luckily, if you disagree with this practice, the solution is easy: don’t pitch the angels that charge you money.

The angels who are charging are not doing this to make more money. $10K is nothing when your net worth is in the double digit millions.1 They are doing this to eliminate the entrepreneurs who don’t truly believe in this product in a subtle subconscious way.

Angels who charge for a pitch are going to have higher quality ideas being presented to them and likely have a higher success rate.

Keep in mind that these startups are asking for million of dollars of an angel’s money for a business that might not work. If you’re successful in raising $10,000,000, what is a $10K investment up front?2 To me, that seems worth it.

What if Craigslist charged $1 for a listing by Seth Godin illustrates this point perfectly although using a different example.

  1. If you have $15,000,000 in the bank, you earn $3,300 in interest every single day at a modest 8% interest. [↩]
  2. Literally speaking, $10K is 0.1% of 10 million. [↩]